In the present specification, a “utility computing system” will be understood to mean one or more hardware or software components connected to each other or network able to each other.
It is known to provide such a utility computing system in the form of an enterprise data center having a pool of resources available to end users. In order to ensure that the resources in the data center are operating correctly, administration personnel are used to validate typical use cases, monitor the resources, perform backup operations, carry out maintenance, and so on.
However, the operations which may be carried out on the data center span various roles, various planes of the data center, and require various levels of authentication, with each role often being carried out by a different person. For example, in an organization having an enterprise data center of significant size, it is not unusual to employ a backup administrator, a network administrator, a data center administrator, a farm administrator, a system administrator, and so on. As a consequence, for an enterprise data center of significant size, the task of coordinating operations between the various data center personnel in order to carry out appropriate end-to end verification of data center functionality can be difficult.